A Whiff Of Success

Million-dollar homes along a long-polluted stretch of the Chicago River fuel new interest in cleaning up Bubbly Creek.

November 21, 2004|By Michael Hawthorne, Tribune staff reporter.

The draw of living close to water is so strong that million-dollar homes are going up along Bubbly Creek, an infamous stretch of the Chicago River lined with nearly a century's worth of waste from the city's livestock slaughterhouses.

Hidden from most Chicagoans by factories, warehouses and scrap yards, the murky tributary has festered for decades on the western edge of Bridgeport. Bubbles that gave the creek its name still occasionally rise up from decaying offal and carcasses caked on the bottom, releasing bursts of foul-smelling gases into the air.

It is a place where few things live, or stay for long. At least until now.

Expensive homes under construction along the once-industrial banks of Bubbly Creek--officially known as the South Fork of the South Branch of the Chicago River--are prompting a push from Mayor Richard Daley's office to clean it up.

Regional and state officials also are taking a closer look at the creek as they decide whether the Chicago River's sewage-filled canals and channels should be disinfected to remove disease-causing bacteria.

Improving Bubbly Creek, or at least ridding the surrounding neighborhood of its summertime smells, can't come fast enough for Mark Putnam, who lives about a block away in Bridgeport Village, a new subdivision that eventually will include 400 houses on either bank of the waterway.

"It's great to say you live on the water, but nobody is going to brag that they live on Bubbly Creek," Putnam said recently before walking his dog on a brick path along the east bank. "They say it's a lot better than it used to be, but it still stinks on some days."

The occasional stench hasn't dissuaded home buyers willing to plunk down at least $1.2 million to live at the edge of the creek. All but a handful of the 35 lots with water views in Bridgeport Village have been sold.

"The people who have moved in seem to love being near the river," said Thomas Snitzer, president of Arlington Heights-based Snitzer Homes, which turned an abandoned rail yard into one of the largest developments of single-family homes being built in Chicago in decades.

"While people aren't going to go swim in the river," Snitzer said, "they view it as an amenity."

An open sewer

During the heyday of the Union Stockyards, the creek was an open sewer for the killing pens and packinghouses. The neighborhood was a slum where immigrant workers lived in cheaply built wood-frame homes.

"Here and there the grease and filth have caked solid, and the creek looks like a bed of lava," Upton Sinclair wrote in "The Jungle," his 1906 expose of the stockyards. "Chickens walk about on it, feeding, and many times an unwary stranger has started to stroll across, and vanished temporarily."

The worst sections of Bubbly Creek were filled in decades ago, long before the stockyards closed in 1971. But the waterway still is considered one of the dirtiest parts of the Chicago River.

Scientists from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently determined the benthic gunk in Bubbly Creek is at least three feet thick in spots. "The core samples we pulled up just reeked," said George Azevedo, an EPA water specialist.

Today the fetid bubbles popping on the creek's surface more likely are created by untreated sewage from a Metropolitan Water Reclamation District pumping station off Racine Avenue at 38th Street. Nearly all of the water on the South Side drains through the plant.

Scum collects

Scum that collects on the banks after heavy rains has no place to go because the creek has no current other than the occasional sewage overflow. Instead of being flushed downstream, the waste settles on the bottom and slowly decomposes, continuing the creek's malodorous legacy.

The Deep Tunnel project--a network of tunnels and reservoirs that capture storm runoff--has reduced the amount of untreated sewage being dumped into the creek. But the pumping station still is forced to open its gates about 17 times a year, according to the water district.

There also are at least a half-dozen other pipes that pour sewage and storm runoff into the creek.

People have been talking about cleaning up Bubbly Creek for years, only to see their efforts fall short after it became clear that fixing the pollution problems could cost millions of dollars.

Daley has suggested the sediment be sealed on the bottom. Others have proposed dredging. Now a mayoral task force is trying to figure out if there are less expensive solutions that could improve water quality enough to make living next to the creek more pleasant.

One option, flushing out the creek by sucking water back into the Racine Avenue pumping station, helped increase the amount of oxygen in the creek during the last three summers. The experiment improved water quality enough that a water district employee caught a four-pound coho salmon in the creek a few months ago.